Readers wanting a more conventional history of Times Square in its first century might want to turn to James Traub's excellent The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (Random House, 2007) or a remarkable series of scholarly essays, edited by William R. Taylor, Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). But readers who seek a deeply personal and passionate work that is open about its nostalgia for Times Square and uses a series of icons and moments in the square's history to make a rousing defence of the right to the city and its public spaces, will want to read the inimitable Marshall Berman's book.

It begins (in a section called ‘My Family Romance’) with a red dress – the red dress his mother used to wear when she went out with Berman's father for a night on the town, which meant to Broadway and Times Square, to ‘take a bath of light’ (p. xxvi). (I had hoped to use this red dress in an exhibition I curated on the history of Times Square in 2004). His mother, seeking a romantic night out, also recognized something more profound: that in Times Square could be found most everything that would define the United States in the twentieth century – popular culture, new roles and possibilities for men and women alongside intense exploitation, urban planning experiments, new forms of consumerism and marketing. Times Square is, in Berman's estimation, ‘the most dynamic and intense urban space of the twentieth century . . . America's gift to the modern world’ (p. 23).

The story of Times Square's first one hundred years is told through a series of idiosyncratic episodes and cultural artifacts. The Benetton ‘Colors’ advertisement (featuring a diverse and nude cast of young people) by Tibor Kalman is the latest stage of signage in the square, a reason for optimism for Berman, despite its obvious exploitative nature; Alfred Eisenstaedt's infamous V-J Day photograph serves as introduction to a close examination of the musical On the Town and the ideals of manhood played out in the square and on stage and in film; Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie serves as a way into a discussion of the changing agency of women in the square and the permeability of reality and fantasy on Broadway. And yet On the Town is ultimately about something far more than nostalgia for Times Square's past, or even just Times Square: it is a call of defence for the city and for the public spaces of the city. Berman marvels that in the heart of the capital of the capital of capitalism, where people and ideas and products are sold on the street, in the sky, in lights and neon and LED, there is also a rare sense of freedom – freedom of walking, looking, desiring, protesting. The square, writes Berman, ‘has noticed and inspired all sorts of men and women to step out of line, to engage actively with the city, merge their subjectivity into it, and change the place as they change themselves’ (p. 225).